‘Surrealists’ at the Art Museum (2nd review)

It’s in itself notable that just on the basis of what’s “in-house,” this exhibit gives a full and rich picture of Surrealism and how it has influenced modern art and philosophical thought. That the exhibit includes works by more than 75 artists, among them Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Dali— suggests Surrealism’s immense scope in the modern landscape.

Surrealism spread rapidly from its origins in Paris to the rest of Europe, and then to New York (where it impacted modern artists, from the likes of Jackson Pollack to Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein) as well as Mexico (where it influenced Diego Rivera and elevated Frida Kahlo to the status of an icon), not to mention other hotbeds of artistic innovation.

Breton’s misconception

The movement also stimulated and became a part of post-modern thought and deconstructionism. It influenced art, architecture, literature, philosophy and social thought, infiltrating style, advertising and our daily lives.

This pervasive impact becomes strikingly clear as you navigate the exhibit’s three large rooms, which move from Paris to larger European developments and then to the global art scene, especially in America.

The reason for this global impact is that Surrealism shattered traditional views with a revolutionary philosophy that consisted of prioritizing the irrational, non-logical and non-traditional over the aesthetic representation of the real world. (The Cubism that preceded Surrealism still represented the real world, although in a dissected manner.) However, André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” which launched the movement, also created a misconception.

Avoiding Freud’s couch

Breton defined Surrealism as “Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express… the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." (Italics mine.) Some critics have taken these words literally, as if the artist or writer allows the unconscious to flow unbridled, and the “dream” that comes out shows up on the canvas or in the writing.

Breton’s manifesto suggested a “stream of consciousness” technique— an impulsive act of creation. The current exhibition shows that, in fact, few of these artists let it all hang out in the manner of a patient free-associating on the Freudian couch.

Rather, they utilized images, mythology, condensations and displacements of parts of objects, as well as other manifestations of the unconscious, in very deliberate ways to create dramatic effects that would impact the mind, emotions, and visual field of the viewer in well-planned art-conscious ways.

This was an ideological movement that had very specific intentions for each artist. Each utilized dreams and the unconscious as ideas from which they constructed objets d’art rather than direct expression through “psychic automatism” or spontaneous execution on the canvas.

Man Ray’s eye

A prime example is Man Ray’s Indestructible Object, a small and unassuming but striking and by now famous item in the exhibit’s first room. It consists of a real metronome with a picture of an eye attached to the pendulum. (It isn’t clear whether Ray intended the pendulum to be active during an exhibit; here it is motionless. Nor was it indestructible; the 1923 original was destroyed and later reproduced.)

The dream-like aspect is the unexpected appearance of a human eye on a mechanical device. The metronome’s reference to time recurs throughout “Surrealism”— for example in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, where clock-faces melt and droop, so that time loses its solidity.

Time took on significance for the artists through Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration and Einstein’s relativity theory. The eye perhaps symbolizes the self, which is here a Cyclopean observer detached from the body like Descartes’ cogito (“I think; therefore I am”).

The combination of mechanical and human elements recurs in surrealist productions. Man Ray’s metronomic “I” is a well-thought-out construction unlikely to appear in a fantasy or dream as such.

Dali the traditionalist?

As you proceed through the exhibit, you confront a totally different kind of work: a large-scale centerpiece, Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of War). The “soft construction” that occupies most of the canvas is a grotesque and fragmented statuesque embodiment, dead but painfully alive. It has weight and instability. The destruction of war is seen in the corpse and detritus at the bottom.

This painting, which initially appears to be a total departure from tradition and realism, actually embodies the great traditions of master painters from the Renaissance on: a vast sky, chiaroscuro, agony suggestive of the Crucifixion, anatomical sophistication and symbolism (the boiled beans as the “daily bread” of the Spanish peasant). It belongs with Picasso’s Guernica as a grief-stricken testament to the Spanish Civil War.

This is a monumental painting, crafted with all the tools and skills of a great artist, reflecting the painterly tradition across the centuries. It’s the farthest thing from “psychic automatism” that one can imagine.

Nightmare birthday

Several of the Surrealist paintings on exhibit include a large area of sky, perhaps representing the ambiguity, space and trance-like state of dreams, and indirectly referring to the great landscape paintings of the past.

The sections showing American artists include Dorothea Tanning’s landmark Birthday, painted during World War II, when Surrealist artists (including Dali) came to the U.S., and it clearly reflects their influence. Like the Dali painting, Birthday contains strong classical references: a self-portrait consisting of a partly nude female figure, a gargoyle-like animal at her feet, perspective, and hints of a side room or scene, but in this case opening recursively into many rooms. A nightmarish quality is achieved by the reduced color scale, the trance-like stare of the birthday girl’s face, the suggestion of a frightening specter in the foreground beyond the canvas, and several doors that nervously point in different directions, as well as the woman’s witchy attire and the bat-like creature at her feet. The overall effect is paranoiac, except for the woman’s face and bust, which have an erotized, intimate caste.

Reducing distance

Tanning eventually married the surrealist Max Ernst, and this painting is an early manifestation of a whole set of new influences on American art that radically changed its direction from Impressionist and Cubist to highly experimental forms like Abstract Expressionism.

This rich and multi-faceted exhibit convincingly shows that Surrealism didn’t merely consist of Breton’s automatism or “art-as-dream.” More generally, Surrealism deconstructed both reality and the canvas, revealing them to be facile artifacts, and granting the artist permission to explore many new techniques and means of expression— a harbinger of what was to come, whether Rauschenberg’s collages of paints and objects, Rothko’s emotion-laden patches of color, Pollock’s drippings of paint, Warhol’s portraiture of common household objects or Lichtenstein’s comic strips. The surrealists reduced the distances between the unconscious, the artist, the medium, the viewer and the experience, which ultimately made for the huge post-modern expansion of creative possibilities beyond what was seen, what was represented, and what was real.

To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.